Management of Manufacturing & Automation

The Tepper School of Business and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University offer a new doctoral program in the Management of Manufacturing and Automation.

The program gives qualified students a total-system perspective on manufacturing issues. It provides students with an understanding of the management of automated manufacturing systems including robotic systems, flexible manufacturing systems, and assembly systems.

The program is particularly useful for students interested in gaining a perspective which integrates management, engineering, and computer science to solve the new challenges of design, planning, operation (including real-time control), and evaluation of modern and automated manufacturing systems and industries.

The program draws upon a broad base of techniques in operations research, including graph theory and network flows, stochastic models and control, and artificial intelligence, that have been used in a diversity of areas such as computer communication networks, computer architecture, process control, and robotics. These methods are amalgamated with management areas to generate approaches for solving problems of management and control in modern automated manufacturing complexes.

Research

The program in the Management of Manufacturing and Automation draws on the resources of both the Robotics Institute and the Tepper School of Business.

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

The highly-acclaimed Robotics Institute is an interdepartmental research institute that conducts research and development in intelligent robots and machine systems. The Institute also facilitates the transfer of the resulting technology to industry.

One of the major thrusts of the research program of the Institute is automation and computer-integrated manufacturing. Faculty members are conducting projects in areas such as:

The Tepper School, likewise, is highly acclaimed as one of the nation's foremost mathematically-oriented management schools, and it brings its strength in quantitative analysis to the study of management problems. The school also maintains close research interactions with state-of-the-art automated manufacturing facilities, so that students and faculty members continually test their ideas against real-world industrial realities.

Among the projects that faculty members are now addressing in the area of Management of Manufacturing and Automation are the following:

Manufacturability of VLSI circuits

Planning, scheduling, and real-time control for electronic/computer assembly

Design and operation of flexible manufacturing systems/factories of the future

Intelligent systems for production, planning and control

Production control in automated automobile manufacturing and assembly

Interdisciplinary Approach

Students in the Management of Manufacturing and Automation program work with faculty members both from the Tepper School and from the Robotics Institute, and on projects that involve faculty members from both areas.

This interdisciplinary focus means that students also work closely on issues in accounting, finance, economics, and marketing, and the ways in which they affect the design and operation of modern manufacturing facilities.

Students are immediately involved in research activities and in publishing papers, often joint papers with faculty members. Because the program is small, the faculty is able to tailor programs to meet the needs of each student.